It’s been quite a year thus far, and we have some reading recommendations from new books on economics that were published this year that you may have missed either because of the identity of the author, or their geographical location, or because the topics are not typically considered interesting to those interested in reading about the economy. We include 11 books that cover a range of topics that we think provide a richer understanding of socioeconomic phenomena and are therefore crucial to understanding economics and the world.

With the escalation of the othering of migrants all over the world and increasing repression of movements opposing genocide in Palestine, especially in the United States, this time around we are reading two books that look at the political economy of the United States with obvious global repercussions: one around the business of incarceration of immigrants and one around how decolonization movements in the rest of the world has shaped United States politics and economics. We also love reading about the field of economics, and therefore we include a new and exciting volume on radical political economics and about why we need to decolonize feminist economics. Excellent beach reads, in our opinion! The race to general artificial intelligence has come to define our time, and our reading list would be incomplete without a comprehensive look behind the scenes of one of the biggest firms in the business: OpenAI. The environmental cost of AI is increasingly becoming evident, as is the rapacious nature of the resource-grab to support the development of these enterprises. Therefore, we also have been reading two new books on the topic: one on environmental transformation, capitalist expansion, agrarian extractivism and local resistance across Senegal’s River Delta and one on grassroots resistance to the privatization and commodification of water using the lens of global solidarities. Relatedly, we include a short but powerful new book on the intertwined colonisation of Palestine and imperial capitalist expansion enabled by fossil fuels’ destruction of the Earth. Finally, we always love reading about third world movements, and this time this meant reading a new autobiography of Andree Blouin, an analysis of political and social transformations in four pivotal Global South nations- Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, and about representation of anti-imperial history through the periodical of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Tricontinental.  

We hope you enjoy these books! As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions for our next reading list. 

Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

By Karen Hao

Generative AI has become ubiquitous in our lives. One of the most successful companies in the AI industry is OpenAI, which is in quest to develop artificial “general” intelligence, described by the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, as the “most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented.” However, behind the development of this seemingly transformative technology is the consumption of “previously unfathomable” amounts of data, labour, computing power, and natural resources. It is therefore not surprising that Hao likens the leading power players in the AI space to Empires that exploit and subjugate workers and seize and extract resources for their own enrichment, often by theft and compromising sovereignty, among other things. This book, which explores how OpenAI has operated and shaped the AI industry, and the global economy at large, is compulsory reading for an era in which it is impossible to open any application on your phone or computer without some type of AI feature being pushed on us.  

Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants

By Nancy Hiemstra and Dierdre Conlon

With growing anti-immigrant sentiment all over the world, especially in the United States, this book provides a shocking, yet essential look into the political economy of depriving immigrants of their freedom. Specifically, Hiemstra and Conlon show that since corporations and local governments in the United States now depend on the financial rewards that detaining immigrants brings, an incentive to incarcerate even more immigrants in worse and worse conditions is created. Furthermore, they also show how many people and institutions are implicated by the vicious cycle of more and more profits being generated by locking up more and more human beings. This has altered society’s moral compass and also internationalized the problem: with detention becoming a nearly universal response to “unauthorized” international migration. 

The Internal Colony Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization

By Sam Klug

This book reveals and interrogates the importance of global decolonization for the divergence between mainstream American liberalism and the Black freedom movement in post-War America. As global decolonization is generally underappreciated as a force that has shaped American politics, through this book Klug allows the reader to understand different American political movements in a new way. In doing so, Klug demonstrates how debates about self-determination, post-colonial economic development, colonization and decolonization have shaped American politics, even in spheres that are often primarily thought of as related to domestic policy, such as issues of race and social class. Overall, the book provides us with a history that broadens our understanding of ideological formation and the global forces that shape it. Buy the book here.

Decolonizing Feminist Economics: Possibilities for Just Futures

By Gisela Carrasco-Miró

This book is a much-needed critique of feminist economics. Carrasco-Miró traces how certain parts of feminist economics have remained locked in a Western-centric modernism and how they have failed to engage with the critiques of Eurocentrism that other social science fields have had to deal with. As an alternative understanding, she introduces what decolonization of feminist economics would involve, and in doing so, she explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ecological degradation. Moving beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries, Carrasco-Miró draws on a range of scholarship from across the world to put forward a transdisciplinary and radical view of feminist struggles which are ultimately global in nature. You can buy the book here.  

Radical Political Economics: Principles, Perspectives, and Post-Capitalist Futures

Edited by Mona Ali and Ann E. Davis

This exciting collection of essays demonstrates that radical political economics is a vibrant and dynamic field. The chapters are written by brilliant political economists from across the world and they touch on a range of urgent topics, including class conflict, ideology, financialisation, feminism, imperialism, crises, social protection, migration, development assistance, state capitalism, worker cooperatives, economic development, and climate change. The contributions together offer a sharp critique of capitalist institutions as well as of mainstream economics, and in doing so they also reveal the underlying structures and dynamics of global capitalism. In addition to its sharp and convincing critique of contemporary problems, the radical political economy of this book also offers ideas and policies to change capitalism in ways that are more beneficial for people and the planet. Buy the book here.

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria

By Andrée Blouin

Andrée Blouin’s autobiography—long out-of-print and now available under the supervision of her daughter, Eve Blouin—narrates the story of, per one of the monikers used by the 1960s newspapers, the “Most Dangerous Woman in Africa”. Born to a Banziri mother and a French colonial father, Blouin was in the thick of the decolonization movements across Africa throughout the 1950s and 1960s: from revolutionary work in Guinea and, most notably, the Congo (Blouin, a speechwriter and diplomat in Patrice Lumumba’s government, wrote Lumumba’s independence day speech) to an exile in Algiers (where, as Eve Blouin reminds us Amílcar Cabral noted, revolutionaries make pilgrimage) and, finally, France. The memoir’s title is a nod to Blouin’s expansive pan-African nationalism, whose enactment and promise intersect with her own life perched at various conflicting identities. As Blouin concludes her autobiography, “speaking of my life has been my way of speaking of Africa”—a story that will be of interest to anyone committed to decolonial struggles around the world. Buy the book here.

Teaching with Tricontinental: A Sourcebook for Students Working with Radical Periodicals

Edited by Danny Millum and Paul Gilbert

Launched during the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, Tricontinental was the official periodical of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America until the latter’s dissolution in 2019. What can one learn from the representation of anti-imperialist history in the pages of such revolutionary periodicals? This open-access edited volume, the fruit of a collaboration between staff and students at the University of Sussex, collects a series of possible textual and audio-visual answers: engaging with archived radical periodicals, inter alia, fosters “radical imaginations and emancipatory futures” (p. 18) that may otherwise seem foreclosed; reveals the importance and fragility of archival and publishing infrastructures; sensitises to the textual and paratextual choices in building international solidarity; and deconstructs Eurocentric historical education, including the lack of tendency “to understand development as coterminous with anti-colonial liberation” (p. 16). The volume is an important, fascinatingly creative pedagogical and emancipatory tool in helping students, and others, re-imagine past visions of the possible into the present and future. The volume is freely accessible here and the digitised collection of Tricontinental issues—an outcome of the University of Sussex workshops—is available here. For digital archives of other radical periodicals, see The Freedom Archives and here.

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

By Andreas Malm

Two catastrophes underlie Andreas Malm’s “longue durée analysis of fossil empire in Palestine”: the unfolding genocide in Palestine, actively abated by the capitalist core in the West, and the ecological destruction wrought by fossil fuels, which “kill people, randomly, blindly, indiscriminately”. These catastrophes are not independent, Malm argues, as he takes us back to a single moment of co-determination between the two: the British empire’s first use of steam warships, powered by fossil fuels, in the 1840 pulverisation of the Palestinian town of Akka. The pulverisation fulfilled many aims: imperial (it cut short Egypt’s burgeoning and short-lived contest of the Ottoman and British empires), economic (it supplied outlets for Britain’s overproducing cotton industry), and ideological (it opened, to a proto-Zionist project, the Palestinian land, where the British, in Lord Palmerston’s words, hoped to implant “a great number of wealthy capitalists”). In this powerful pamphlet, Malm narrates the intertwined colonisation of Palestine and imperial capitalist expansion enabled by fossil fuels’ destruction of the Earth. Initially published on the Verso Blog, and a step towards a larger future sequel to Malm’s Fossil Capital, the essay in this edition is accompanied by Malm’s response to his critics. Buy the book here. 

Land, Capital and Extractive Frontiers:Social Conflict and Ecological Crisis in the Senegal River Delta

By Maura Benegiamo

Using ethnographic and archival research, Maura Benegiamo explores the complex interplay between environmental transformation, capitalist expansion, agrarian extractivism and local resistance across Senegal’s River Delta. While examining land grabs, the author traces its colonial roots to establish links with the current ecological crisis stemming from the relationship between capital and nature. The book locates how green growth is used as an extractive tool under neocolonial capitalism in the Global South while providing insights into how communities respond to such policies using grassroot struggles for justice. 

Global solidarities against water grabbing: Without water, we have nothing 

By Caitlin Schroering

Caitlin Schroering undertakes a powerful examination of grassroots resistance to the privatization and commodification of water using the lens of global solidarities. Drawing on two transnational movements, Schroering highlights how communities are organising and learning from one another across borders to defend water as a public good and a human right. The book delves into the political, ecological, and social dimensions of water struggles, emphasising the role of feminist and anticolonial movements in global activism for water rights. Caitlin’s work is a compelling call to action against extractive systems and for water justice worldwide through collaboration between the Global South and the Global North.

Southern interregnum Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa 

By Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Karl von Holdt, Ruy Braga, Ching Kwan Lee and Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos

This edited volume undertakes groundbreaking analysis of political and social transformations in four pivotal Global South nations- Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. The authors locate the responses of the governing elites in these four emerging powers to a period of enduring crisis—marked by deep inequalities, popular unrest, and shifting geopolitical dynamics. While employing a Gramscian lens, the book examines distinct hegemonic projects in each country viz. authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil, neoliberal ethnonationalism in India, digital expansion in China, and patronage-violence in South Africa. The volume offers a vital contribution to critical political economy as it maps the turbulent reordering of power and its limits in the Global South as a tool of accumulation and legitimation in a period of exhausted neoliberalism.

This list was compiled for D-Econ by Devika Dutt, Afreen Faridi, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, and Marina Uzunova